Lord of the Isles (53 page)

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Authors: David Drake

BOOK: Lord of the Isles
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F
rom the outside the building was a brick warehouse exactly like the score of others backing up to the River Erd. A mule-drawn dray loaded with barrels of turpentine drove out of the double doors as Garric arrived with Liane and Tenoctris. The dray smelled strongly of pines, a welcome change from the harbor's stagnant marshy odor.
Garric looked at Liane, wondering if she'd mistaken the address. She stepped briskly to the pedestrian door and rapped smartly on the cast-iron knocker there, an unexpected piece of furniture for the surroundings.
A small triangular hatch at eye level opened. “Mistress Liane os-Benlo and companions to see Master Polew,” Liane said. “My father is indisposed and it's urgent that I talk with the banker.”
“One moment,” a voice replied. The hatch closed.
Liane turned to her companions and said, “Polew's a Serian. They don't care to advertise their wealth to the world at large.”
.The door opened. The doorkeeper was a tall, willowy man wearing a jacket and pantaloons of brown silk. “I'll take care of your sword for you, sir,” he said to Garric. “Or you can wait outside if you'd prefer.”
Garric unbuckled the sword belt and wrapped it around the scabbard before handing the whole ensemble to the doorkeeper. He disliked the weapon. Its weight pulled his hips out of alignment and the chape protecting the bottom of the scabbard regularly knocked against his calf as he walked. Swords were less common in Erdin than they had been in Carcosa, but not so rare that Garric stood out for carrying one. If he
was to protect Liane under the present circumstances, he figured he had to go armed whenever possible.
Besides, grasping a sword hilt was a quick way to hand his problems over to King Carus for swift and certain resolution.
Carus chuckled at the back of Garric's mind. There were times when a man had to act without thinking. The problem was to know which times those were.
The doorkeeper stood in an alcove beside stairs leading upward. The brick wall separating the staircase from the rest of the building was so thick that when the door closed behind him Garric could no longer hear the shouting and bustle of the warehouse.
Liane pattered up in the lead, pinching her robe with both hands so that the hem didn't trip her. A glazed skylight illuminated the stairwell, something Garric had never seen before; a five-armed lampholder hung from a chain for use later in the evening.
A young woman with dark skin and black hair pushed aside the door curtain at the head of the stairs and bowed to Liane. Liane bowed in reply, then led her companions into the room beyond.
A tall man, very thin and old, was standing behind a thinlegged writing desk. Garric suspected the man was bald beneath the bonnet made of white silk like his robe. The walls were paneled in bleached oak with gilt ornamentation along the seams, grapevines and passion fruit.
“Master Polew,” Liane said, bowing again.
“Mistress Liane,” Polew said, returning the bow. “I regret to hear of your father's indisposition. Pray be seated.”
There was a chair behind the desk and three chairs in front of it. They were traceries in gilt and white enamel, so spidery that Garric was afraid to trust his weight to one until he'd surreptitiously pressed his hand on the back and found that it didn't flex. He sat down a moment later than the others.
Against one sidewall stood a statue of a slender goddess flanked in separate niches by a pair of demons. Across the
room a strongbox was fastened to the floor and the wall by iron bands. The room had no other furnishings.
A Serian of moderate height in a thin cotton robe stood behind Polew's chair. His head was cocked to the side; his arms dangled. He didn't look directly at anything, but Garric had the impression that there was nothing his eyes didn't see.
Garric had expected that a banker would have bodyguards festooned with weapons. This man was a weapon.
“Master Polew,” Liane said without preamble, “my father was killed on the business his principal set him. It's imperative that I get in touch with that principal at once.”
The banker tented his hands. His eyes were cautious. “I am very sorry about your father, mistress,” he said. “I will plant a tree in his memory. And I am very sorry also that I cannot help you with your request.”
Liane leaned forward to speak. Polew turned one of his hands palm-outward to forestall her.
“Mistress,” he said, “my family has handled your family's business for three generations. Unfortunately the account about which you ask was not set up by the bor-Benlimans but rather by another client of the firm. You understand that an honorable man and a prudent businessman cannot discuss the affairs of his clients with third parties.”
“Master Benlo was killed by a demon,” Garric said. He heard his voice tremble slightly. He laid his palms flat on his thighs and stared at them. “The demon tore him open, then carried Mistress Liane to Hell, sir,
Hell
, from which only a great magician was able to rescue her.”
He raised his eyes to meet the banker's. “Master Polew, she has a right to know who was responsible for that.”
Polew lowered his hands. His face was without expression. His mouth opened to speak.
“Master Polew,” Liane said quickly before the refusal was spoken and therefore final, “I respect your unwillingness to tell me who your client is. But you can tell me who the banker was whose draft opened the account, can't you? That doesn't touch your honor.”
The banker smiled slightly. “No, mistress,” he said, “but I'm afraid I can't provide that information either. The account wasn't opened by draft, you see. The client provided a quantity of bullion of high quality. Old Kingdom coins, to be precise.”
He pursed his lips and added, “Mistress Liane … on reflection, I don't think it would hurt to tell you that my client is unknown to me also. The person who set up the account was completely muffled. I wouldn't recognize him again, and I don't assume that he was the principal in any case. Further instructions have come in the hands of boys. They say they were stopped in the street by a veiled figure who told them that I would pay them to deliver a packet to me. That's all I know.”
“Do you still have any of the original coins?” Tenoctris asked.
Polew looked at her, appraising for the first time a figure who'd been as silent as the furniture till then. “Yes,” he said, “I kept them all, as a matter of fact. They were the most perfect examples of their kind I've ever seen.”
He walked to the strongbox, then knelt before it. His robe spread to hide what his hands were doing; certainly he wasn't inserting a key. The bodyguard stepped between Polew and the visitors, giving them a vacant smile. Unless you concentrated on the man's eyes or noticed the flat ropes of muscle directly under his skin, you could imagine he was a dimwitted potboy who'd somehow stumbled into the wrong room.
Polew stood and handed Liane a thin coin the size of Garric's thumbnail. King Carus looked out in rakish majesty, his features as sharp as the die from which they'd been struck.
“No, you needn't pay me, mistress,” the banker said as Liane reached into her purse for coins. “Take it as my grave offering for your father. In former times …”
Polew looked around the room with a faint smile. The only windows were skylights of hammered glass that distorted images into blurs of color.
“I rarely leave my quarters, you see,” he continued. “Your father used to bring me stories of far lands, stories so wonderful that I thought of traveling myself. But the stories wouldn't have been wonderful if it had been me living them, you see; I knew that.”
“Before my mother died,” Liane said.
Polew nodded. “Before the tragic loss of Mistress Mazzona, yes,” he said. “Take the coin, mistress, and take also my regrets for not being able to help you more.”
Liane and the banker exchanged bows. She turned and the female attendant held the curtain back for the three visitors.
They didn't speak until they'd reached the street and heard the doorkeeper shoot the bolts behind them. Liane gave the coin to the wizard. “What do you plan to do, Tenoctris?” she asked.
“Tomorrow …” Tenoctris said. “Not tonight, because it's already too near sunset, but tomorrow during daylight I'd like to return to your family tomb. There I can have the privacy to do a sourcing ritual that will tell us, I rather think, where the gold came from. At the inn, I'm afraid someone would interfere.”
Liane's face tightened.
“She needn't come, need she?” Garric said.
“I'll come,” Liane said. “He's my father, Garric. I'm not afraid to do whatever it takes to understand why he had to die that way.”
“I
am
afraid,” Tenoctris said with a smile that did nothing to rob the statement of its truth. “But the ritual itself shouldn't involve any danger. It's in what comes next that the risk lies … .”
S
harina led the last of the four coach horses back from the stream where she'd watered them. Meder sat looking at the campfire; Asera was arranging a blanket into a bed for herself under the coach. Privations hadn't changed the procurator, but she bent with the wind when she had to.
“Where's Nonnus?” Sharina asked. They'd come about five miles south of Gonalia. The road was good by any standards a girl from Barca's Hamlet could apply—a firm bed and no ruts deeper than the axles of the coach—but there was no reason to risk driving in darkness once they'd gotten beyond the immediate vicinity of the castle.
Meder turned and looked at her. The fire behind him hid his features; he didn't speak.
“He went into the woods,” Asera said. She pointed in a general direction across the road from where the coach stood. “Not long ago. Not too long.”
Sharina set the hobbles on the horse. It and its fellows whickered to one another. They were used to stalls at coaching stations. They spent most of their lives either enclosed or harnessed, and they weren't sure they liked this new practice.
The recent rain had brought out the frogs and toads. They weren't the species Sharina knew from Haft. Their cries, particularly the tuneless scream of one of the toads, wore on her temper. She walked into the woods with the coachwhip, using its long butt as a feeler in the dark.
Sharina didn't have a right to be angry at Asera and Meder for being what they were. She was frightened and far from home, but they were as much out of their depth as she was.
She eased her way past a thicket of cedar saplings too
dense to push through. Charity doesn't come easily when you're alone in the dark.
“This way, child,” Nonnus said from nearby. He stood at the base of a conifer at least ten feet in diameter.
“I just wanted to see …” Sharina said. “I wanted to see that you're all right.”
He laughed. “Oh, yes,” he said. “I was praying.”
Another giant tree had fallen within the past year, smashing a two-hundred-foot hole through the forest. The saplings springing up to fill the gap hadn't yet closed the sky overhead. Starlight showed the hermit's face and the features of the clearing.
Nonnus had shaped the bark at the conifer's base into an image of the Lady. He'd used no more than six quick strokes, but even a stranger would have identified the figure at once. He was an artist with the blade.
His belt and Pewle knife hung from the branch of a larch ten feet back from where he'd been kneeling before the image. The javelin leaned against the same sapling, its fluted blade gleaming in the Starlight.
“I had to get away from them,” Sharina admitted in a low voice. “I wanted to …”
Her features hardened as she allowed them to show what she really felt. “Nonnus,” she said, “he shouldn't be alive. His blood magic makes me sick. I'd rather die than be touched by it! You didn't see what happened to Callin and the guards.”
The hermit smiled faintly. “No,” he said, “I didn't see that.”
He looked at her. His face had its usual wooden calm. The only times Sharina had seen any other expression there was when Nonnus held the knife and there was blood on its blade.
“Dead is dead, child,” Nonnus said softly. “How one man killed another doesn't matter to the dead man and it doesn't matter to the Lady. I'm not the one to object to the way another fellow does his work.”
“Nonnus, he's not human anymore!” she said. She wanted to cry. “I'm not sure he ever was.”
“Don't say that!” the hermit ordered. More gently he went on, “Child, don't ever let yourself think that somebody isn't human because you don't like what he does or what he wears or how he prays. Don't ever do that, because if you do you'll find yourself doing things that you'll never be able to forgive. Or forget.”
Sharina knelt because her knees were wobbling. She laid her head in her hands and began to cry. Nonnus squatted beside her and put the tips of two fingers on her shoulder.
“Why somebody died and you lived isn't a question for you, child,” he said. “It's in the Lady's hands. We have to believe that.”
“I hate what he did,” Sharina said. Her sobs faded to gulping; she got her voice under control again. “Nonnus, he says he did it for me and I believe him!”
“Yes, I believe him too,” Nonnus said. He put his fingers under her chin with a gentle pressure so that she met his eyes.
“I killed the men upstairs,” he said. “I didn't take any chances: they had to be dead for you to be safe, so I killed them.”
Sharina looked into the hermit's face, wondering what he saw when he looked at her. “If you killed them for me,” she said, “then their blood isn't on your hands.”
Nonnus said nothing.
Sharina drew the dagger from beneath her sash and walked to the trunk of the fallen tree. She stabbed the point deep enough in the thick bark to hold; she didn't have a belt and sheath to hang the weapon by, out of the way.
She turned, knelt before the image of the Lady, and began to pray for the souls of the enemies who had died that she might live. After a moment, Nonnus knelt beside her.

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